by Guy Haley
“That’d be worse,” said Quinn. “No man wants to go into the forests up that away.”
“I know it’s out of the way, sir, and risky like you say. But there is no dragon that direction. Only the dead.” He gave a short, apologetic laugh. “If ‘only’ is an apposite term.”
Quinn huffed; the New Virtue route was a hundred miles out of the way. More.
The postmaster’s voice dropped. “The dragon kills most folk who try to go through its territory.”
“Anyone seen it?”
“One boy. Hunter. Stumbled onto the railroad tracks of the main line, raving and half dead. He said he saw it, well into Pleasant Bend. It’s getting closer ever year.”
“Where is this hunter now?”
The postmaster bared his teeth, an odd expression. I’d have said aggression but he was too good-natured. Postmasters have to be diplomats. I decided the conversation was shaking him. He had yellow teeth, crooked and poorly spaced. He nipped the tip of his upper lip between them. “He died not long after coming into town. That was four months gone. Nobody has been that way since, and nobody wants to try.”
“I’m not interested in Huntingdon. I’m headed north. Tell me about Winfield. Say I get a boat like you say, can I get there if I come in from Point Pleasant?”
“Well, that town’s gone! Burned out twelve years back. You see, sir, I meant it sincerely when I said about the dragon. The people are dead or fled. It’s getting so dangerous we reckon that it won’t be long until the dragon turns its attention on the shipping going up and down the Ohio.” He smiled sadly, inviting Quinn to join him, to share the misfortune. Quinn did not smile. The man blinked, taken aback.
“There’s no ferry at Point Pleasant anymore?”
“No, sir! And no bridge neither. The emperor’s bridge there got burned up not long after the dragon came. And you won’t get a riverboat captain worth his salt stopping in that vicinity at all. No, sir, they’re all afraid of the dragon, they power on through like the wrath of God is on them, which it would be, sir, if they were to stop. No expense in charcoal or coal spared. You want to go to Winfort, you go via the river and head further north, come down through the forests. That’s my advice.”
Quinn was displeased by this news.
“We’re worried here it won’t be long before the Emperor’s Punishment comes upon us. We got men watching the northeast every day, but we worry it ain’t enough. What can we do? We can’t move the city. We can only pray that the dragon moves on, or the angels take it away. Time was we blessed the name of the emperor, but we won’t speak it now, no sir. A curse on him, that’s what we all say, for what he brought down on us all here.”
“The emperor did a lot for this country.”
“The emperor,” said the postmaster, stiffening. “His pride. We all suffer for it still, praise the Lord for his mercy in punishing us gently for our sins.” The man dropped his head. He looked up at that moment Quinn was supposed to say “amen,” but did not.
“Will that be all, sir?”
“How about that reward.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” The postmaster poured himself another drink. He drank it with unsteady hands. This talk of the dragon had shaken him up.
Quinn looked at me. I looked at him. The dead terrify me, but I wasn’t scared of a dragon. No danger of losing your immortal soul if you die by one of them.
The postmaster went to a tube set into the wall, and shouted into it. “Are the seals still on the bags?”
A tinny voice replied. “Yes, Mr. Friend. Still sealed, and all the right dates and codes.”
Friend smiled apologetically at us. “Some of the bandits have become inventive, stealing the mail and resealing the bags with copied cramps. All of them have got their own codes stamped into the leads now. I am sorry if it appears if I doubt you. It’s all standard procedure.”
“No concern of mine,” said Quinn. “It’s a good procedure.”
“It helps,” said the postmaster, a little mollified. “Anyway, as I am sure you heard . . .” He went to a small iron safe and unlocked it with a tiny key, all alone on a ring at the end of a chain. He withdrew a double-skinned cotton bag and passed it to Quinn.
Quinn hefted it, reached into his pocket, and tossed Friend a big silver dollar. Not one from his reward purse, but one from a kingdom I don’t know. It was an odd shape.
“I shouldn’t really,” Friend said, in a way that suggested he really wanted to.
“Not for the reward. For your being accommodating and giving us the information you have. Keep it.”
The man clutched the coin to his chest and bowed his head, a little salute. Rich men stay rich taking whatever money comes their way. He paused, wanting to say more, not sure if he should.
“Thank you. Do be careful, sir. There aren’t enough of your kind left.”
“Maybe. There are stories growing around the knights, and they aren’t all true,” said Quinn. “I ain’t no hero, but we’ll be careful.” He put his hand on my shoulder, and steered me out of the postmaster’s office.
We left by the front, and back in through the big doors to the post yard. The mail wagon was being unloaded; the horse had gone. Quinn took his own animals back, checking their packs quickly. The mailmen paid us no attention, and we left.
We spent the next few hours buying supplies with my mother’s money. Every street corner showed me another marvel, and I was dragged away from them all. Quinn did not want to stay within the city walls longer than he needed to, and by late afternoon we were out of Charleston and heading north.
The Road to Winfort
WE KEPT TO THE HILLS on the west side of the Kanawha, avoiding the old towns to the north of Charleston.
It’s best to steer clear of the towns of the Gone Before. If you don’t got business going in there, then don’t. But in the valley there wasn’t much left to avoid. Charleston had once stretched well up the river, occupying all the flat lands on the banks. Not that you’d not know it. The modern town looked huge to me, but in truth it had become tiny.
Sometime after the Fall the Kanawha had heaved itself out of its bed, moving in when the people had moved out. Some of the old streets were a maze of pools that you’d only know for being streets once by their shape, and that was the kind of place bad things wait for you to happen by. Bandits—they’re the worst to my mind, the living preying on the living. And if there weren’t many dead men lingering in the valley, there were enough.
Me and Mom and Quinn passed from Charlotte and followed the railroad west toward Huntingdon and the docks there on the Ohio, but before long we turned north, following the emperor’s overgrown northern line for two or three miles. We left the railroad and went up into the low hills to the west, wary of what we might meet on the flatlands, even that close to the city.
On the ridgeline we felt safe. The valley had been full of buildings, now it was thick with woods. Real dense, the sort of thickets that’d trouble a wild pig. On the opposite side of the river to us were many of the dead places, sunk in the river or swallowed by the forest. Dunbar, St. Albans, Jefferson. These are places that are no longer places, names for stretches of woodland only a learned man can tease out from old books. I only know their names because that’s what I did.
The ridges were clearer than the flat. The road of the Gone Before that ran on the west side of the river had been cleared by the emperor’s armies for his railroad and his war. But after the emperor had overreached himself and fallen foul of the angels of Pittsburgh it’d been abandoned again. I can’t tell you how that railroad brought it home to me, how puny the works of man are compared to those of the Lord. Thirty years old that railroad was. The main east-west run was fine and shining, but the north was a wreck. Sleepers rotted in their bed. The rails of the first five miles had been picked off and taken away. Trees and bushes erupted through the road and towpath.
The emperor clearing the old roadway for the railroad made the woods down by the river even worse to travel
than they were before. His men had piled up everything they’d no use for alongside. There’s all manner of junk hidden under the poison ivy for long stretches, making it a really good place to get ambushed.
Where we had to go through the villages of the Gone Before we crossed them quietly and as quick as we could, us on Quinn’s big white horse, him alongside jogging silently but for the jingle of his armor. Most of these places were nothing but grouped platforms of concrete hidden in the woods, or lonely shaped stones poking through turf and litter. I was hoping to see some of the carriages of the Gone Before, the marvelous carts without horses they rode, once upon a time. When I was a kid I was told they was all the colors you can think of, gold and blue and red, all as glittery as a beetle’s wings and smoother than polished gold. But there weren’t none. I asked Quinn where they were and he said they’d gone to rust long, long ago. He showed me some black crumbly stuff one night that he pulled out of the soil.
“They thought their world would last forever. This is all that is left of the things they thought eternal,” he said. “This was plastic, stuff made in the Gone Before. You won’t see much of it around no more. It’s a fine lesson in hubris.”
“Amen,” said my mother.
I was real disappointed.
Sometimes the horses’ hooves crunched on broken glass hidden by the vegetation. But if there’d been houses there, they too had rotted to nothing. Mostly we knew we were in a place of the Gone Before when Quinn pointed out a lot of mounds that told tales on the remains hiding underneath. There was one fine sight, a fat-bellied tower half in the water, taller than the hills around it. Looked like an unfinished clay chimney pot, still on the potter’s wheel. Solid enough to last the ages, covered in a web of green crawling plants like a vertical forest. It amazed me, then chilled me.
From up high in the hills traces of the old world were easier to see—a patchwork of squares in the woods; areas where the trees are tall, ones where the trees are short. It’s funny. In places where there are men, the Gone Before might never have been, them little signs of what was scoured away by what is. But in that place, where people had never widely settled again, you could see a time of wonders picked out in shades of timber. It makes you understand why some folks think the Gone Before were giants. I came to the opinion that we’re best off away from all that out here, where there never was much and still ain’t. It makes a man feel peculiar to see it all laid low, those works, makes you look at your lifetime’s effort and see it as nothing. We have the promise of heaven, sure enough, but folks like to make their mark on the world. You look at the likes of that tower and you start wondering what the point is.
Take my advice, don’t ever go into the old places. The ghosts there call tears that can’t be stopped, and you’re not ever sure why you’re crying them.
We had to come down off the hills to get to the bridge. We skirted a rank old lake full of reeds. The edges of it were lined with stone or concrete, and you could see it had been much bigger once. Now there was a pathetic puddle of open water in the middle, home to a few ducks. From there we went into a place that had been the southern part of a place called Winfield, and now was a boggy wood.
There was one building standing, all made of stone. The mortar between the blocks was delicate as sand, looked like one gust would blow it down, but it stood.
Quinn didn’t so much as look at the building as we went on to rejoin the railroad, him being used to such things and all, but it sure took my attention. Beneath the choking vines I saw a flash of something bright. We were all going on foot then, so I walked over to get a look.
There was a big window in there behind the leaves, glass so pretty and smooth even under the dirt and grime. It was all colored to look like a picture. Stained glass like what we have in the church, but much bigger, and cleaner cast, no imperfections in it. Old work. You could just make out the picture under the dirt. I saw a cross, a cross of Christ the Lord, radiating out the rays of God’s love. Like us, them before had their churches.
Quinn joined me. “Church of God.” He pointed out a bunch of letters to the right of the window, hidden by creepers. They were carved into the stone but real soft edged, almost rubbed out by time.
“Ain’t no other kind, mister,” I’d said. After that business with Germaine, I was trying to show him how much of a man I was—twelve years old, and not scared by no knight with his two swords and his gun! Of course I was scared. He shrugged at what I said.
“Is it the same?” I said. “Did the Gone Before follow Jesus?”
“Some,” he said. “Maybe not enough.”
“Is that why God struck them down?” I asked.
Quinn didn’t answer me. Instead, he said, “It’s a miracle that glass is still in there. That’s a rare sight.”
I was uneasy. I could see the clouds through the clearer bits of the window, like someone had put it there as a message, just for me. “Is that why he sent the angels, because they were ungodly?”
Quinn led his big white horse away.
I saw something else there in the leaves. Gray bones, very old. A skull in the angle between the church wall and the ground. I’ve seen plenty of dead, and them dead that come back, but that skull there on its own affected me more than any. It couldn’t possibly have been there since the Fall, but I thought it had. I made a little noise. Quinn’s horse flicked its ears at me.
“Be quiet now, kid,” he said. He patted my back absentmindedly, the same way he adjusted his swords. Something he did without thinking. A little further on there were signs of more recent dead about, their stinking scat and the gnawed bones of a wild pig. So we went quick and quiet through the wood that had once been a town. We saw none of the returned, not until we got to the foot of the bridge where that pack surprised us and Quinn had to kill them again.
I had nightmares about that church for years, that window in a forest clearing all on its own, all other traces of men gone from its vicinity. In my dream I’d call out to God but he didn’t hear. There’d be nothing but animals and the dead men, eating and pissing around the wall and its glass cross still gleaming a thousand years old, a mound of skulls piled on the ground before it as an offering.
So, that’s how we got to the Winfield bridge, most of the way to Winfort. From there, our troubles were about to begin.
By the time we had set up camp on the bridge, it was getting dark. After a week together my mom and Quinn had fallen into an easy routine. He’d set the fire, she’d find spots for the bedrolls and go about fixing dinner. First we all scavenged about the bridge, gathering sticks from the feet of trees growing out the concrete. He stacked them close to hand, in the spot where the smoke was most like to go, wet wood closest in to the heat. That all took time. When he figured we had enough, Quinn pulled a bundle of kindling sticks off of his pony, built a teepee out of it, lit it with a big-headed match, and coaxed a little fire into life.
A thread of blue smoke rose upwards. There was no wind at all. Past the churn of the weirs made by the broken bridge and the dam further down, the river was as smooth as glass.
“We need more wood. Come on, son,” Quinn said, beckoning at me.
We worked quickly gathering sticks. Night was coming in fast. You could hear the smallest sound, loudest seemed the crack of the fire as the wood took. The sky was getting so dark and deep that I stopped and stared up at it. After near two weeks of traveling I still couldn’t get used to the stars. We kept the lamps burning all night long in New Karlsville, just like we do here, it kills the depth of the night and makes the monsters seem further away. The sky was a deep purple, so full of lights, the wide band of the Milky Way cutting across it.
“It’s something to see,” said Quinn.
“Up on this bridge, floating in the sky, I feel like I could fall into them.”
“Now that is not a comfortable notion,” said Quinn.
“No, sir.”
“Time was, you couldn’t see them. The world Gone Before was too full of light,
lights in the houses, in the highways. Like in Charleston, but more of them, and brighter.”
“How’d you know, mister?” I said.
“I know, is all. I read. I’ve been places, and I’ve heard things. Once you get as old as me, you’ll understand.”
I shivered. I wanted the tiny tongues of flame to hurry up, eat the wood and make me warm. Quinn jerked his head back toward the fire. He dropped his pile of wood by its side, took my sticks and put them atop his, then went to Clemente. He yanked a blanket from a pack and threw it at me. It was musty, smelled of leather, saddle soap, and horse. My mother wrapped it around my shoulders with a worried nod at Quinn.
Something crashed through the brush on the far shore. I started at it. My mom shushed me. Neither she nor Quinn spoke.
We ate of the food we’d got in Charleston. It occurred to me then that although Quinn was well equipped, he was poorly supplied. He wolfed down his meal like he didn’t know when he’d next eat. There never is enough, even for a knight, no matter how many fields you plant or crops you sow. You might get a couple of good years until the damn dead rise up, tear it down. It’s worse when you’re on the road. Hard tack and jerky, a cup of beef broth made from paste. Go hunting in the wrong place, sin enough to bring the angels down on you, scare up the dead, come across someone meaner and more desperate than you are . . . And no matter how mean and desperate you think you are, there’s always someone who is meaner and more desperate. It’s a wonder there’s anybody alive at all.
An hour after the moon came up my mother made me turn in. She sat up a while, opposite the fire. Quinn stared into the flames, his thumb pressed into his lips like he was silencing himself. My behind was cold, but the fire was warm on my face and chest and I was tired. I tried not to fall asleep, thinking my mom and Quinn might talk again. But they didn’t say a word and soon enough I’d gone.